Of 18 Year Olds and Friends

For obvious reasons, mental illness makes it difficult to maintain friendships. Most of the time, I consider myself relatively reasonable, and figure I can at least hold rational conversations and get my side of things through to people in a way that promotes some level of understanding. That said, it doesn't mean the people who I'm communicating with LIKE me. It just means I've managed to get my message across.

The point here is that I have few close friends. And trying to explain to them just how truly ill I am when I've spent years trying to hide it is a near impossibility. Now I'm trying to figure out why I ever bothered to TRY.

What I've discovered this week is that there is a huge prejudice against mental illness in this society. For some reason, people simply can't wrap their minds around the fact that it's not a weakness, or a choice or a damned lifestyle, but rather as much a sickness in my brain as epilepsy or tourette's or a tumour.

It was actually suggested to me this week that the only thing standing between me and mental health is telling God I accept it.

Considering this came from the last of my friends...my best friend...whom had just finished telling me that everything I had said and written was not ME, and made no sense, and if I just accepted what she was telling me, everything would be fine, it was a huge slap in the face. The slap to the other cheek was that she had no idea how much of a part God plays in my life~no idea at all. No idea that I have indeed accepted God in my life; that God was a part of my life from the day I was born and that the years I turned my back were an anomaly; that indeed, I consider God the only true hope for some sort of salvation from this horror because heaven knows the drugs and therapy aren't doing their job.

And what a slap in the face to know that I'm considered a step below my best friend on her scale of christianity...yet what does it say about the person who has judged me, and found me lacking, because of a chemical imbalance that a doctor cannot define or stabilize? My last friend is gone.

On top of this, I have an 18-year-old living here to whom we've offered a home out of the goodness of our hearts, who insists on telling me how life is; despite the fact that I live this horror day in, day out, SHE STILL KNOWS MORE THAN I DO. You can't imagine the frustration of fighting the mania and depression, taking and changing meds that don't work, dealing with side effects, and then having the self-righteousness of youthful arrogance telling you it's "just doctors giving you pills to make you come back over and over when they don't work anyway".

Do I sound rational? I am, today.

It's a fleeting thing...sometimes I am and sometimes I'm not. Sometimes my thought processes are realistic and rational and sometimes they're just absolute shit. How do I know that? Because when I rethink them when I'm rational, I recognize they're nuts!

A few days ago, my husband spoke with my therapist and discussed how to have me admitted to a psychiatric hospital, should the mania escalate, or result in another psychotic episode. You know the drill: if I'm a danger to myself, or others, or suicidal, away I go. The upside is that it results in a new addition to my wardrobe: the winter-white jacket with the snazzy back buckles...

I should be relieved. At least I'd get some peace from the racing lunacy of my mind. Unfortunately, it just makes me sad that it's come to this. At a time in my life when things should be perfect, they're heading towards disaster like a 747 in a death roll.